View of Bordighera

Early in 1884 Monet went alone to Bordighera, a town on the Italian Riviera just across the border from France. He had passed through in December with his friend, the painter Renoir, and came back by himself to work. A stay planned for about three weeks stretched to nearly three months, and he complained the whole time that the place was fighting him. He wrote to the sculptor Rodin that he was fencing and wrestling with the sun, and found the tangled palms and olive trees almost impossible to compose. What he was chasing was the blue, the saturated Mediterranean color so unlike the grey Channel coasts where he usually painted. Here the town climbs its hill among the palms, one of the more than 38 canvases he carried back north when he finally left that April.